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User blog:Taldin/An Adventurer's Purpose
(....wherein I answer the question, "I'm level 59. Why am I still here? What keeps me coming back?" ) One of the things I noticed early on about HabitsRPG is that you have everything you're ever going to get (in terms of powers, not equipment) by the time you hit level 15. There are no more Skills, and the only difference between a level 15 adventurer and a level 100 adventurer is the amount of damage you can do to bosses. And at level 100, you stop gaining stat points, too. You can usually wind up having bought all of your equipment by the time you hit level 25 or so, depending on your class, and even if you're a Subscriber and buy gems every month, eventually you'll still start stockpiling more gold than you know what to do with. That being said: why would people want to keep playing past level 16, or once they've finished all the quests at least once? Can you, in fact, 'beat the game and be finished with it?' Well, ''life ''isn't like that. You don't just 'win at the game of life by doing things once' and stop playing. Every day, week, month, year, and phase of our lives has new challenges to be dealt with. Any day you aren't changing things, you're just going through the motions. ...checking off Dailies. To-Dos. Indulging in Habits, good and bad. HabitsRPG is about keeping track of those things. Keeping score of what you are doing, what you need to do, and what you want to be doing. So if you find yourself just clicking off Dailies just to click them off, or that you do all of these things as a routine... do what you did in the beginning, as a Level 1 Habitican. *Audit your Dailies. Drop the ones which are second nature, and don't need to be tracked. Drop the ones that you kept getting hit by every single day, because clearly, they aren't things you care to do, damage or no. *Clear off those red To Dos that you never did, months on end. Because not even the idea of tons of gold and XP was enough to get them done. *Then set some new challenges. Add a new Daily, something that can slightly or profoundly change your life if you start honestly trying to practice it. Add a ToDo that you'll do by the end of the year. Hey, there's only four months left in this year suddenly. How'd _that_ happen? *Set up some new custom rewards. That was the other point of playing: to remember to Reward yourself. So far the only things on my Custom Reward list I've done is buy lots of Chinese food, a little cheesecake, and bought some notebooks off of Kickstarter that the project coordinators reneged on the deal. I've spent more Gold on equipment than I have on real world stuff. I said I'd go to the movies, and haven't yet. I have the money to buy myself a new GPS, but I haven't yet. Maybe time to start checking some of _those_ off, and treat myself to some things in life instead of buying more pixels! Life is a game, really. Whether you win or lose depends on how hard you play and how risky you play. Me, I play it pretty safe. I'm at 129 Perfect Days, which means that it's been a month since I wrote my first blog post, and while I've shuffled a few things around, my routine is mostly set at this point. It's why the game doesn't feel like an Adventure, a Challenge, to myself - there's nothing especially hard in my Dailies that I have to worry about making happen every day or at some other frequency. My friends and I have been killing bosses pretty regularly, but it's more like a 'oh, we're damaging the boss while doing dailies', and I'm not sure if we're going to try and do Vice because one of our party members has a tendency to miss dailies in large chunks because she overcommitted, so if she doesn't sign in on time, the 1.5 Strength boss is doing a hefty chunk of damage to the party - and Vice is a 3.0 Strength boss. Since there's nothing we can do to stop incoming boss damage, we're putting our survival trust in her to make sure she does her dailies better if we wind up doing that one. At higher levels, it's actually tougher -- I had to use two healing potions this week to avoid getting killed, because she's in the middle of her finals week and is skipping dailies a lot. And that's another good metaphor - if you drop your commitments to do emergency, high priority stuff, you won't notice it at first, but eventually it does start coming back to haunt you. So being a member of Habits helps in that respect, no matter what your level - you're tracking your life to keep your life on track. And that? Is why I stay. And why I pay to stay, even though I'm not buying my way to Beastmaster (only a few Zombie potions, Golden potions, and or buying lots of customizations. But like a gym membership, you get out of it what you put into it. And the more effort (Dailies, To Dos, and positive Habits) you put in, the better you wind up being as a person - as long as you make those things worth doing part of your Habits experience. Taldin (talk) 00:06, August 9, 2014 (UTC) Category:Blog posts